Blogtrek

Orisinal

I have to admit some of the stuff I have been commenting on lately has been rather heavy. I will choose something more light-hearted tonight. If you are searching for some good video games that are not violent, no Dooms or Dragons or anything of that sort, try Orisinal at www.orisinal.org. Earlier I had commented on the Bubble Bees game. This is the game where you blow bubbles and try to catch bees and once in a while a clock, in them, hopefully two or three at a time. I play this when I want a break from what I am doing. Yes, you catch bees with bubbles. And you catch clocks. That is what makes these games so neat. They are nonsensical and silly, and are generally, but not always, nonviolent.

I found out tonight that there are about a score of other Orisinal games you can play. I tried a few. Some of them I could not get, like the one on stars. How are you supposed to catch them? In one you are a kid on a bicycle trailing a kite, and you are supposed to speed up or slow down to make the kite go up or down so it can catch little starlets that are flying around, but NO BIRDS! If you hit a bird, you are penalized and too many hits and you are out of the game. This whole idea is silly, and the idea of avoiding hitting birds promotes the idea of protecting the environment. Some are romantic. A video game about falling in love? The attempt here is a cruising Freddy Eynesford Hill at a building serenading his paramour with a guitar. She responds by throwing roses at him but the other neighbors don't take kindly to the noise and they throw teapots and coke bottles at him. The object is to collect as many roses as possible without getting hit. Cute.

Some of them have some violence. In "Snowboarding", you see skaters skating peacefully on a frozen pond until you hurtle huge snowballs at them to wipe them out. Some really get crazy. The ozone hole is damaging the environment of penguins so you are supposed to shoot them and thereby encase them in a big ice cube. That saves them. That's right. You hear it right. That saves them. Ok…

My favorite is still the Bubble Bees. The best of the others I saw tonight is "It takes Two". In this ludicrously cute game, a puppy and a kitten bounce up and down on a see-saw at your command. Fruit, pies and other food fly in the air and you are supposed to hop the kitten and puppy up and down on the see-saw to have them hit the food for points. You can either hop the kitty from above onto food or you can plop him on the see-saw causing the doggie to pop up in the air and hit a pizza and a hot dog.

To me these games will appeal to children up to about age 12 and to adults from 35 on up. Doom people between 12 and 35 years old seem to be too tied up in reality to appreciate a game of this sort but I invite them to try it too.